A month with Cingular 8525

After spending a week online and 2 visits to Cingular, T- Mobile store I finally decided to go with Cingular 8525 (which is actually a HTC Hermes OR HTC TyTN I am not sure)2 weeks back. My initial impulse for the phone was great but I wanted to wait for some time to do a fair review. Before you start using any gadget which is trying to stuff A-HELL_LOT of function it you have to prepare your self for some hick-ups. You can not expect something like this flow less. What we should expect is at least the core stuff should work perfect. This phone runs on WinMobile 5.0 which is I think right now best combination of user friendly ness and features. I have not used Pal and any other Gizmos so not very sure how they are exactly but I am very happy with WM5.

Things that makes me Happy….

• Screen is crisp and clear.
• Reception in my house is same as any other phone (generally Smart phone are bad at reception)
• Speaker phone quality is great I can actually play the songs on it while I am playing pool or in the gym (alone ;) ).
• 2.0MP Camera is great I even stop taking my huge Sony H5 with me on small in town trips
• Synchronizing Windows media player (especially WMP11) with this phone is very easy all you have to do is few clicks and then drop the song in the list.
• I got 1GB(its really cheap) MicroSD and it can hold good amount of songs at 128Bit rate to spend at least a week.
• Personal feature like alarm, phone book, To Do, calendar is great.
• Wi fi works like charm in my house.
• I am not a business professional who bought this phone for email and Power point and Excel but I tried them and they works great.
• Battery life is good enough even if I listen to songs for 2-3 hrs and talks regularly it lasts for a day. (generally Smart phone are bad at battery life)
• Sliding key pad is great.

Now… The things I am not happy with.

• The biggest is CINGULAR they simply sucks with Internet speed and the plans are dam expensive. I don’t even use them until I am stuck some where.
• Its on the heavy/bulky side of their domain (so do I L )
• Front buttons are ok but side buttons are not that easy to use. I am still not able to use left side track wheel may be the right side could have done better.
• No standers 2.5MM jack need to use their USB ear buds (they are not too bad)
• There are some bugs in Synchronize software but they are tolerable
• Same way there are some bugs in WMP 10 mobile edition it always forgets the file from library on the memory card you have to do some tricks to fix this problem.
• There is not auto snooze in the alarm so if you don’t wake up in first round of alarm it don’t lays back after few minutes until you snoozed it first time. This is very dangerous and can cost you a lot some time. But you can set three alarms which may be able to help.
• Text recognizer is horrible. I never use it.

Verdict … Really a Good deal J